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If you haven't already heard, A beta version of Flash Player 10.2 is now available from Adobe Labs. New features include enhanced video performance, support for IE 9, custom cursors (which I'm most excited about), and enhanced full screen. More information about the release can be found in the labs site and I'm sure in the many other posts around the web that covered this.

What I'd like to address is something else that's new with this release that you might not pick up on at first: the SWF version update. To use new features in 10.2, you have to publish a SWF to target "Flash Player 11", or more accurately, give the SWF a SWF version of 11 (SWF11). This marks the first time that the Target Player Version, or SWF version, no longer matches the Flash Player version of the player with which it is associated. So while the SWF version moves up to 11, Flash Player remains in 10, instead moving up to a new dot-release of 10.2.

Right now, with Flex, you can publish to SWF11 using the compiler argument:-swf-version=11. For Flash Pro, you will need to wait for a new release to be able to publish directly to SWF11. However, you can also publish to SWF10, then open the SWF in a hex editor and change the version byte - fourth byte in the file - from 10 (0A) to 11 (0B).

I've been meaning to do a tutorial on Flash versions; expect something on that sometime soon... or "next", at least.

In related version news, you may have noticed that the context menu in 10.2 also reveals the current Flash Player version. This can come in handy to know what version of Flash Player you're currently running.

Unfortunately this won't get you the SWF version, but you know what will? swfversion.com (which uses my SWFReader class ;)